


At the Edge of Our Hope

by leftofrevolution



Series: Shall Stand Alone [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-25
Updated: 2016-07-25
Packaged: 2018-07-26 15:12:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7578967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leftofrevolution/pseuds/leftofrevolution
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He had been given the evening to think about Thrawn’s offer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	At the Edge of Our Hope

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [If you would permit me, Lord Maul?](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/216055) by captainmazzic. 



> So... five days ago, the artist captainmazzic started posting really excellent [Grand Admiral Thrawn/Darth Maul art](http://captainmazzic.tumblr.com/tagged/thraul), and some of them come with little accompanying stories.
> 
> [This one](http://captainmazzic.tumblr.com/post/147726123505/if-you-would-permit-me-lord-maul-maul-cocked) contains the relevant backstory for this story, but a quick summary is as thus: Thrawn seeks the alliance of a powerful Force user. For reasons unknown to Maul himself (who in this 'verse never crashed on Malachor and thus never ran into Ezra and company), he wants Maul. This is very confusing, at least for Maul.

He had been given the evening to think about Thrawn’s offer.

From their design, the rooms he had been granted in the meantime were those normally given to visiting dignitaries, for all he could not imagine many of them ever having reason to be aboard an Imperial Star Destroyer. Opulent furniture. More space than was reasonable, the foyer alone being over half the size of the bridge. A live plant, of all things. As comfortable as rooms aboard a war vessel could ever aspire.

The wall decorations were poorly composed photographs of Coruscant’s skyline, which Maul would not have even noticed, under normal circumstances. When considering his recent conversation with the Grand Admiral, they took on a new light of significance. Thrawn had said that this was not his flagship, that he had just taken command of it for the duration of his mission in the Mid Rim before he returned to his fleet in the Unknown Regions. Somehow the photographs substantiated this; they were intended for an audience that would be comforted by the sight of the Imperial Center, and Thrawn did not seem the type to entertain many Core Worlders.

A frivolous line of thinking, and one Maul quickly discarded. Pointless. He had already decided to reject the Grand Admiral’s invitation, had only agreed to stay the night and think about it because- he did not know why.

That was what he told himself, even as the self-deception chewed at the base of his skull. He felt unbalanced, a dangerous thing to be in the heart of enemy territory. Thrawn had said they would part amiably if Maul refused him, and it had _felt_ true, but-

Self-deception again. Sometimes it was difficult to tell the will of the Force from unconscious self-delusion, and Maul had already been exhausted when he arrived. He needed to rest, but he felt too exposed to actually give in to sleep. Meditation was the next best option, but that unbalanced feeling would not make that any easier, in the end.

Collapsing onto the nearest couch and staring blankly out the foyer’s viewport was neither a compromise nor a viable alternative, yet it was all he felt up to at the moment.

He should have felt pathetic, but he was too tired for even that.

He had been sitting there something less than an hour when he heard the door chime. Maul was somehow not at all surprised when he waved a hand to open the door and Thrawn walked in, holding a bottle of some sort of liquor and two glasses. The Chiss was smiling in that cool, even way of his when the door opened, but something around his eyes brightened when they fixated on Maul, still sitting on the couch and nowhere near the door panel. “Lord Maul.” Thrawn nodded respectfully, and Maul nodded back, tensing despite himself at the intrusion. He was in no condition to be playing mind games with a man as clever as Thrawn. “I hope you will not find it presumptuous of me to ask if you would care to join me for a drink before you retire for the evening.”

“You are here to try and convince me to accept your offer,” Maul said bluntly, in no mood for dancing around the topic.

Thrawn just raised an eyebrow in reply. “Of course. But I thought some wine would not go amiss either.” When Maul was silent for a long moment, Thrawn’s lips quirked and he said, “It’s Alderaanian,” not as if he expected Maul to care but just stating a salient fact.

Maul did not, in fact, care, but all the same he found himself waving his hand again, the door closing behind Thrawn but the gesture more pointedly indicating the chair to the right of the couch, a silent invitation that Thrawn implicitly accepted by seating himself comfortably in the chair and putting down the two glasses before he began working to efficiently open the bottle. Maul found himself inadvertently examining the Grand Admiral’s hands as Thrawn pulled a corkscrew out of one pocket and started peeling the foil off the top, obviously practiced in the task. It was somehow soothing to watch someone who seemed to know exactly what they were doing, and it was in less than a minute that Thrawn had opened the bottle, finished pouring a generous portion of wine into each of the glasses, and held one out to Maul—who took it automatically—before picking up the other glass for himself. “I think I’ll save the toast for until we know the resolution to our discussion.”

Maul did not reply, and he did not even bother to sniff the wine before he put it down on the table and folded his arms back across his chest. Thrawn did not seem offended, though he watched the movement carefully, as if storing it away for later. “You are planning to refuse me.” He did not sound surprised.

“Yes,” Maul said.

Thrawn swirled his own wine around a little, obviously thinking, before he took a small sip and said, “What I want from you has nothing to do with the Emperor.”

Maul did not bother holding back a sneer. “You are sitting across from me in an Imperial Grand Admiral uniform.”

Thrawn remained unperturbed. “A means to an end. If the Republic were still in power, I would be dressed before you as one of their officers instead. I sought only to gain the trust of the single greatest power in our galaxy, in order to gain its assistance in combating an outside threat. This uniform is just an indication that I have done so. I have been granted a fleet; while Emperor Palpatine occasionally has me dealing with his interests in the Unknown Regions, for the most part, I am allowed to do as I wish. He believes me as to the existence of the threat, if not as to its scale.

“All of that is a beginning; however, I do not think it is _enough_. What I want is to protect our galaxy from an invasion of a force hereby unseen, that I think presents a greater danger than any of us can fully understand. It will not differentiate between empires and republics; it does not care about factions, or petty conflicts. If it would not destroy us all, then it would destroy all that we are.

“I have seen what this force does to the worlds it conquers; most of the inhabitants were even still alive. Those that still had some awareness of what had been done for them…” Thrawn’s eyes darkened, nearly imperceptibly. “They begged my men for death.

“I cannot claim that what I want from you would not benefit the Emperor. It would, because it would benefit _everyone_. The assistance I believe you could render this mission might very well be incalculable, but… so would the cost.

“The invasion has not even begun, not truly. We have only encountered their scouts thus far, and even those laid waste to entire systems. It may be a shadow war for years, or even decades to come. My prediction is this: With or without your help, billions of people will die. Without your help, we will certainly put up a fight, but most of those numbers will be ours, and trillions more will be subjugated in a manner that makes the Imperial slave worlds look like a paradise. _With_ your help, however… I do not know what would happen, and never has that thought been more comforting to me than now.” And then Thrawn looked at him, and waited.

Several thoughts struck Maul immediately: One, in terms of concretely offering him something of value, Thrawn’s offer was completely lacking. It was the kind of speech that seemed designed to sway a Jedi, which was ridiculous, because Thrawn knew Maul’s history as well as anyone could outside of Sidious.

Two, Thrawn completely believed in every word he spoke. For all it had not shown in his face, and his hands remained absolutely steady, terror had pulsed when he spoke of the invaders, razor sharp and thrumming beneath his skin.

Three, it was disconcerting, almost alarming how tempted Maul was to accept anyway. It had been a very long time since someone had thought he might matter. But that still begged a question. “Why not tell the Emperor this?” Maul finally ground out, something jagged caught in his throat. “You said he believed you, and he is more powerful in the Force than I.”

“The Emperor believes there is a threat; he would never believe it poses a threat to _him_ ,” Thrawn answered calmly, though his gaze never left Maul’s own. “And he would never step away from his throne, nor send Lord Vader away from dealing with the threats that directly concern the stability and strength of his Empire. His Inquisitors are puppets. The Jedi are dead, and from what I know of them, they could not have faced the enemy I speak of and emerged with their sanity.”

“And that leaves me.”

“And that leaves you,” Thrawn agreed. “But please, do not be mistaken; you were my first choice the moment I became aware of your existence, long before I realized you were also my _only_ choice. I am the bridge between the Empire and the Chiss Ascendency, and that is necessary if they are ever to work together, but I cannot lead this war alone. I need an ally in this, not a master who will try and wrest command, or another subordinate who will blindly follow me into disaster.

“This is a very particular kind of war: from the moment it began, we were at a disadvantage. I do not know the limits of their forces. Our strength will be in our perseverance, our alliances—and there are more to be found, in the Unknown Regions, in the depths of Wild Space—and our ability to understand the enemy.

“Perseverance, the Emperor has, and Vader, and perhaps the Jedi, once. But such is easy to have, when you are always assured of your victory. And the empathy to know one’s enemy, to know who is _not_ one’s enemy- that I am not sure any of them ever possessed.”

Maul was glad, at that moment, that he had put down the wine glass; if he had been holding it, he knew the stem would have snapped between his fingers, tension turning his knuckles white. “You are assuming a lot about me, Grand Admiral.”

Thrawn took another sip of his wine, seemingly unconcerned. “Perhaps so, but reasonably, in my estimation. You are a man who has found allies in the darkest places, and made of them armies. Your friends in the Death Watch still hold Mandalore, if I am not mistaken. You pitted yourself against the greatest military forces in the galaxy-“

Maul’s wine glass shattered. “And _lost_ ,” Maul hissed in the sudden silence—the broken glass dripping wine onto the table, sliding down to form a small puddle on the floor, “Or have you forgotten that?”

Thrawn met his eyes calmly, seemingly unbothered by the unexpected show of Force. “Yes, Lord Maul, and lost; I expect to do a lot of losing, and knowing how to do so—how to keep going on, and salvage what you can—is just as important as knowing how to win.

“Our alliances will be forged on piles of corpses, with those who have lost their home worlds, their friends, their _families_ ,” and it was then that Maul knew the extent of what Sidious had revealed to Thrawn, and he felt himself grow cold, but Thrawn continued on, his stare for the first time that evening focused somewhere other Maul, somewhere Maul could not even see, and his red eyes were blank with pain that was quite distinctly his own, “And how could they trust us, if we did not understand what was at stake?

“I do not need any Force user, Lord Maul. I do not need the Emperor, or Lord Vader, or their servants.” For all that Maul sensed it coming, it was still startling when Thrawn’s hand reached out and wrapped around his own, his light blue coloring an odd contrast against the red and black of Maul’s fingers. Thrawn’s gaze, only momentarily diverted, returned to Maul’s with alacrity; it burned like a brand, but somehow, Maul felt no desire to jerk away. “I need you.”

Sometimes it was difficult to tell the will of the Force from unconscious self-delusion. Sometimes lies felt like reality, if you wanted them enough to be true. The fact that Maul could _feel_ Thrawn’s conviction, in his voice, his eyes, the Force itself- it could not be credited. He had not trusted his own feelings in a long time, and this could be no different.

And there was nothing in it for him. Not really. This felt like a suicide mission. It likely was. And invincible conquerors or not, some planets would be overlooked. There was always someplace to go, in order to go unnoticed. If life had taught him anything, it was that he could survive anything, as long as survival was his only goal. An invasion would not be the end of him, if he had any sense at all.

But-

It had been a long time, since someone had thought he mattered. That saw something of value in him that was not simply his use as a tool. He had not even tasted the wine, but the feeling of Thrawn’s thumb, brushing over the back of his knuckles, was intoxicating all the same.

His tongue tasted dry, clumsy in his mouth. His quiet “ _Yes,_ ” would have felt inadequate—hushed, as if he feared being overheard, even by himself; a trickle of speech in the face of Thrawn’s earlier torrent of words—if it were not for the brightening of Thrawn’s eyes, and the slight curve of his lips as he brought them down to the back of Maul’s hand to brush them lightly against the skin.

 _Supplication_ , his Sith training whispered, pleased at the deference, but Maul brushed that aside. He had relinquished the Darth title long ago, and those thoughts had no place here. He should not mistake this for anything but what it was. Thanks, gratitude.

Nothing more.


End file.
